An Ending is a Very Delicate Time

That title comes from the prologue to David Lynch's film version of Dune, although I've changed the word "beginning" to "ending". The epigraph still works though... the only thing that will more reliably derail a great story than a shaky beginning is an ending that just doesn’t stick the landing.

In general, the entertainment industry these days doesn’t like endings. When it comes to the stories that they tell/sell us, they’d rather chase after one word: "franchise" (this is second only to the word "cult", which in this case translates as an avid, engaged and loyal fanbase). That's where the real money is, in this world where film and television studios and publishing houses are only moderately-funded arms of titanic multi-national corporations -- whose main focus has always been building brand loyalty. The down side, therefore, is that the people we trust to lead us through epic, years-long stories, often don't know where, when, or even how their stories are ultimately going to end. And it's been proven over and over that there is no greater vitriol than a fan base who feels like they've been betrayed or cheated when a franchise doesn't end the way the feel it should. Ironically, the longer a story goes on, the more elaborate and fleshed-out the mythology becomes, and the harder is it to come up with an ending that has enough of a twist to it to delight, albeit one that fits so perfectly that it's the exact resolution that the fans didn't even know they wanted. It's like trying to hit a moving target that keeps getting smaller and smaller.

This is especially true of TV, since there's rarely an auteur with a singular vision. Even people like Ronald Moore, Aaron Sorkin, Bryan Fuller, etc., can’t be the sole visionaries of a five-season series the way a movie director or a novelist can. A person just can’t sustain that kind of creative involvement for so long. It’s the most precarious position of all, I think: you have to provide millions of people with an hour’s worth of entertainment every week, which the vast majority of them won’t directly pay for. They have high expectations, and will turn on you in a heartbeat if they see something they don’t like. So who, in my opinion are some of the winners in this extended high-stakes gamble? What series do I think really got it right? Or, barring that, which ones at least made the ending interesting, or polarizing? Here's just a small sample – and does it go without saying that spoilers abound beyond this point?

"Friends": I’m starting with the obvious, really. This was the biggest show in its day (1994-2004), was the anchor of NBC’s classic Thursday prime time lineup, and could have kept going for as long as they liked. True, the final season ran into the problem that many shows do when they start getting long in the tooth, having to revisit (and sometimes contradict) previous plots and themes once their characters’ lives and backstories are fully fleshed out. But in the case of Friends, they also set several story arcs in motion that would give all the characters plenty to do: Chandler and Monica's adoption process (with Joey being the main "antagonist" in the plot), the potential of Rachel moving to Paris and taking her and Ross's daughter with her, and Phoebe's wedding (and, as much as I enjoy watching Paul Rudd, shouldn't she have ended up with Hank Azaria in the end?!) It all built toward the final scene, with the characters standing in the bare apartment, talking. That's all the show was really about at its best, and watching them all walk out the door together for the last time (and the slow zoom on the iconic frame around the door's peephole) had just the right tone.

"Twin Peaks": By the time the end came, this David Lynch/Mark Frost show, which had been the hottest thing on television just a year before, was staring down its second cancellation after being revived due to fan clamor, which in part took place on the fledgling Internet. After the resolution of the central mystery early in the second season (“Who Killed Laura Palmer?”), the series devolved into a weird amalgam of queasy humor, macabre/incomprehensible side plots, and stunt-casting (why oh why did they let Diane Keaton direct an episode?!) Fortunately, Lynch and Frost had enough passion to eventually take the reins back and give us a great finish. They had never wanted to solve Laura's murder at all -- but the network nixed the MacGuffin idea and pressed for an answer, fearing that the audience couldn't be teased forever. So after the mystery was resolved and a half-dozen foundering episodes that pretty much sealed the show’s fate, they set up an even larger mystery, leading up to a cliff-hanger ending that put no less than five major characters in life- and soul-endangering situations. The result of what Cooper found in the Black Lodge (and what he brought back with him) has fueled fan speculation for over twenty years.

"Gilmore Girls": Amy Sherman-Palladino and her team have a way of constructing a small-town community from the ground up. And by the time you've spent even a few hours in Stars Hollow, you feel like you live there. You know the people, and you could probably find your way around if you suddenly found yourself dropped off at the city limits. It's actually a testament to her style that, when she left the show after six seasons, she had assembled a team that was so on board with what she was trying to do that the show was able to close with one more season while only minimally degrading the quality. Of course, the ending centered around the dissolution of the mother-daughter relationship that was at the heart of the series. For Lorelai, the mother, they basically hit the reset button on her on-off-married-divorced relationship with the curmudgeonly Luke. And Rory, the daughter, ended up leaving home to work on the presidential campaign trail of a first-time candidate... some unknown Illinois congressman with the unlikely name Barack Obama. I can't help but wonder where Rory is now in that alternate universe.

"Newhart" - I remember the night this sitcom finale aired, and the way the series' final scene created such a collision of nostalgia, hilarity, and plain old shocked surprise. Of course, it's now the textbook example of how to twist and subvert expectations when closing out a TV show... Bob Newhart wakes up next to his wife from his previous television series, revealing that what we have been watching for five years was really an extended dream sequence within that original show. It could have felt like a rip-off (like the way that Dallas erased a season of ill-advised changes with an “It was all a dream!” moment), but Bob and Suzanne Pleshette played it perfectly, instantaneously creating a classic moment.

"St. Elsewhere" - Where the Newhart ending was a unanimous success, here's an example of how a twist ending can polarize an audience, even to the point of alienating them from the show as a whole. In the final scene, it is revealed that the titular hospital exists only inside a snow globe, and the people and events we watched for years were all in the mind of a young autistic man (never mind that the show had aired several crossover episodes with other shows which supposedly took place in the real world). Still, that's probably what the show will be remembered for generations from now.

"Lost" - It's now generally understood that the creators of Lost didn't have their endgame planned out from the beginning, although they played it as if they did. It would all be explained, they said, and no, the characters were not in Purgatory. Looking back on it now, five years later, it's starting to matter less and less that all the questions that were brought up during the show weren't really answered satisfactorily. What I remember more are the characters, the relationships, and the sense of wonder the series evoked, which was severely lacking in nearly all shows before and since. It was all tied together, yes, but its ending “revelation” didn’t live up to the endlessly complex mythology and weirdness that came before it. Seeing as the show had spent seven solid years weaving an immensely convoluted tapestry of mythology, I suppose no ending would have.

"Futurama" - While forever being The Simpsons' less popular cousin, this show was actually more consistent in its focus and the clever way it twisted science fiction tropes to its own hilarious ends. When the series was cancelled after four seasons, Matt Groening and his team decided to make an open ending, with the Planet Express team willing throwing themselves into a black hole (and possibly into an alternate universe), sure only in the knowledge that whatever their fate, they would face it together. It was an uplifting way to send off the characters, although it would turn out to be somewhat premature – they would continue to live on in four straight-to-video movies, then two more seasons on another network. As of this writing, there’s still 13 episodes left to air even though the second cancellation has been announced, so this show will be the only one on this list to have *two* series finales. We’ll have to wait and see what Groening & Co. have dreamed up for the ultimate finale.

"Pushing Daisies" - For the two seasons of Bryan Fuller's comedic series about a pie-maker who solves murders by being able to briefly resurrect the dead(!), Pushing Daisies wrapped every one of its 22 episodes with enjoyable quirk, by way of astounding comic-book style art direction, endearing characters, and the occasional musical number. Here's a rare case of a series creator knowing the end is coming, and doing his best to make it pay off. Although it seemed a bit rushed, the show used its last two episodes to wrap up all of its ongoing story arcs, and brought the characters to a conclusion that, after being charmed by them for two years, paid off handsomely. It might not have been particularly surprising, but with characters we had grown so close to, not having a resolution would have been crueler than rushing the ending.

"FlashForward" - The mid- and late-00's were full of people trying to find the "next Lost", and we were flooded with shows that promised big, mythic, sci-fi based ideas on the meaning of life, love, and existence, with enough convoluted mythology for the newly-minted Internitpickers (my own word-creation, patent pending) to obsess over and catalog in wikis. This was my favorite of that crop, the premise being that, one day, every person in the world is given a simultaneous 137-second vision of what they will be seeing and hearing exactly six months in the future. One man saw himself visiting his Marine daughter, who he thought had been killed in action. One woman saw herself cheating on her husband with a man she hadn't even met yet. One man saw nothing at all. The show dealt with the FBI trying to sort through all this... why did this happen? Did someone cause it, and was it an accident, or on purpose? All the characters had to deal with the aftermath of their visions: How should the man go about finding his daughter? Would the wife still cheat, knowing full well that she was dedicated to her marriage but about to meet her future lover? Was the man who saw nothing going to be dead in six months? By the end of the first season, most of the answers were given, and the show looked like it was going to wind down. Not surprising, since it hadn’t been picked up for a second season... but then the ending turned into a cliffhanger in which the world went through *another* "flash-forward", which showed even farther (years, if I'm remembering right) into the future. What impressed me about it was that the show creators could have changed the ending, knowing that a second season would never come, but they kept it. The reason was most likely because they had put so much time into crafting that final montage, full of flashes of different locales, situations, new characters, etc. that they had nothing to lose by keeping it. Where Lost didn't know where it was going, FlashForward kind of had to know, at least a little bit, because the characters’ visions used footage that would have to woven into the actual story when the time came. All that unfulfilled promise still intrigues me.

"Fringe" - Fringe was always a borderline show for me, and by that I mean that after all the alternate realities and complex mythology, I almost stopped caring about the characters. It wasn't that they stopped being well-written or interesting, but it was just that at the end of season three, Joshua Jackson's character permanently switched timelines, and from them on worked with a set of identical characters who did not know him (in the alternate universe he switched to, he had died as a child). I couldn't help but be continually reminded of the fact that the characters were *not* the people who I liked from the beginning of the show, and wondered what had happened to them in "our" world. There was some mumbo-jumbo about him causing his girlfriend to "become" the old character we were familiar with – he transferred all her alternate-universe memories into her or some kind of nonsense -- but after that point I found myself always on the verge of losing interest. I kept up with it until the series finale, and at the end the course of time was reversed so that the show's final cataclysm never happened, giving the characters license to have their happy endings. It was well done, but I never quite got over the taint of that third season switcheroo.

"Firefly" - This Joss Whedon western-in-space show didn't have a series finale, per se, because was cancelled halfway through its first season. But it was what happened *after* the cancellation that made it so impressive. The nineteen-episode series -- including four or five that never got the chance to air -- were released on DVD and started taking on a life of their own. Online communities got involved, championing the show's wit, charm, propensity for swearing in Chinese, and just plain goodness, and managed to rally enough troops to convince the powers-that-be that a follow-up movie should be made. That film, "Serenity", didn't make too much of a splash outside of the already-dedicated fan base of Browncoats (as they came to call themselves), but for those who loved the characters and style of the show, it was just about everything they wanted it to be -- bigger, bolder, shinier. Whedon has said that he crammed what he had planned for the next two seasons of plot into the film, and the result was a brilliant resolution and sendoff for a show that should have lived on for years.

"Sports Night" - Aaron Sorkin's other millennial TV show (the first being "The West Wing") was a sitcom about the crew of a Sportscenter-type TV show. It flew along at a thousand miles an hour, throwing out clever dialogue and obscure references in patented walk-and-talk sequences, with the characters joyfully debating all sorts of topics, only a few of which directly dealt with sports -- I think my fellow-Aaron picked the subject just because it could be used as a metaphor for so many other human situations. A good example is the character who became obsessed with researching a particular championship sailing accident as a way of dealing with his parents' divorce. I remarked to my wife that watching the show actually made me feel smarter, mentally challenging myself to keep up with it, and it was exhilarating. The show ran for two full seasons, and it was a rare case of the end being both premature and prepared for. There was an extended plot arc where the titular show was about to be cancelled -- meta, right? -- while the management tried to find a way to salvage it. The end was a meticulously plotted word puzzle, which gave so much of just the right amount of things-changing vs. things-staying-the-same, that it felt like it had been Sorkin's endgame from the beginning.

“M*A*S*H*” - When it went off the air in 1983 after 11 seasons, this series finale was the most-watched television episode in history. I was only 11 at the time myself, but I understood that it meant a lot to a lot of people. And looking back, I can understand why. While the show was about a mobile medical unit in the Korean War, it started its run just after the US finished a humiliating defeat in another drawn-out Pacific war, this time in Vietnam. The show was always hard to pin down... was it a goofy comedy? A harrowing war drama? It managed to somehow hit both of these points, and every bit of spectrum in between, which I think was the secret of its success. As for me, I remember watching it in syndication and being slightly bewildered by the fact that I could never figure out whether whatever happened on screen was about to be followed by a laugh track or not. To be honest, I was watching the night of the finale, but fell asleep during the middle, so it seemed surprisingly short. I was aware that there were dramatic farewells and other moments happening that just didn't resonate with me because I didn't understand the show well enough. Still, it remains one of the most beloved send-offs of a show that ran for a ridiculously long time, by 1970s standards. So they must have hit that sweet spot between comedy and tragedy that so many other shows swing for, but never quite connect with.

"Roseanne" - I'm probably in the minority, but I thought the ending of this series was brilliant. To some, it was a poor payoff of a season-long joke that made it appear that the show had run off the rails. To sum up: the ninth season of the story of the Connor family started with them winning the lottery. For a show that had spent its entire run up until then featuring (and appealing to) a staunchly blue-collar, scrappin'-and-survivin' family, it was a pure left-field moment of "Whaaa???". And as the individual episodes got more surreal and outrageous, with celebrity guest stars, world travelling, and divorce drama, we all thought that we were actually watching the psyche of volatile creator/star Roseanne fragment in front of our eyes. The idea seemed plausible; by the ninth season, the series had pretty much run its course and was on the way out anyway, who's to say that she didn't just announce "I don't give a crap anymore" in her trademark nasal tone and just start throwing in everything but the kitchen sink? But it turns out there was a plan after all... in the series finale we learned that all along we had been watching Roseanne's character writing her life story. And while the beginning of the series was "true", more and more the show became life as the Roseanne character wanted it to be... children married who she thought they were supposed to be with, instead of who they really did, the family found their way into money, her husband had never died of a heart attack partway through the series, etc. What we thought was creative laziness had really been a run-up to the final shocking revelation that what we were seeing was a character creating an alternate version of her life, the one they wanted instead of the one they had. This did, and still does, strike me as very profound and moving.

Of course there are lots of examples I’ve left out, and if I have it’s probably because (shocker!) I haven’t actually seen every TV show ever made. Aaron Sorkin said that the hardest thing about television as a storytelling medium is that it's "all middle". Meaning that you need to have a great premise, and a great resolution to that premise, but then you also have to stretch out the middle part, never actually getting to the ending, but always progressing toward it, for an indefinite amount of time. Mysteries have to be teased and teased and teased, but as we saw with "Twin Peaks", solving the mystery is almost as lethal as making the audience wait too long, as we saw with shows like “The Killing”. It's a high-wire act that only a talented few can make worth our while, and I always applaud anyone who attempts in a new way.

The Gibbering Demon Test

Imagination is a muscle. It's something you've got to exercise in order to keep it toned. This is why so many adults seem to have lost most of their imagination. They either don't have or don't take enough time in the day to use it. I'm just as susceptible to this as anyone else. In fact, usually when I try to visualize something incredible, what usually ends up happening in my head looks like a reasonably-good-but-still-obvious-CGI-special-effect version of it, which frustrates me to no end. Seriously, why would my mind’s eye immediately concoct something that looks like it was pieced together by someone on an iMac? The only thing I can guess is that, now that just about every special effect in television and the movies is done by, or *can* be done by, computers, we see so much more of it. CGI has a look that is good, but you still notice on an almost subconscious level. Things don’t move quite right, or don’t have enough weight to them. It's even gotten to the point where you start to see CGI effects where there aren't any. Try this for fun: the next time you watch a TV show, see if you can figure out whether one of the characters is being greenscreened in. Even if none of them are, inside of a minute you'll start to notice things that make them look like they could be.

Anyway, there's something that I do from time to time to try to stave off the effects of too much of not doing my own imagining. It's a little mental status check, a way to reboot the imagination a little bit, and it all stems from a world mythology book that I read back in middle school. There was a section that gave examples and drawings of other cultures' ideas about ghosts and demons, and one I remember in particular was a "gibbering demon" from India. Their purpose, if I'm remembering this correctly, is to come at night to people who have done something wrong, and whisper incessantly into their ears until the sound drives them mad with guilt and they confess. Basically, a horrific version of Jiminy Cricket. These creatures, the book said, were about five inches high, scarlet red, and, like many other Indian deities, are in possession of several sets of arms. I remember the image that they had in the book... it had the face of a tusked, mad-eyed half-animal.

When I read the book as a kid, the sight of it sent a shiver up my spine. It was so exotic, weird, and terrible-sounding. And for just a moment, I started to wonder what it would be like to meet up with one of those things. I actually looked up from the book toward the open doorway of the room where I was reading, and I had a sudden vivid idea of what it would look like if such a thing were to suddenly walk in. To be clear, I didn't actually believe that I was seeing one, but I had a very clear idea of what it *would* look like. I could imagine every detail... the tiny red demon, lumbering from side to side with each step from the weight of all those arms, muttering its mad language to itself in a barely audible voice as it made its way into the room. I could even envision the way its feet would sink a little bit into the carpet.

It came to me with such perfect clarity that I've tried to hang onto that clarity, some thirty years later. Every once in a while, if I'm just sitting in a room, I'll take a look at a doorway or corner and try to call back that little demon with the same quality it had the first time. There have been times in my life when I've been able to somewhat approximate the experience I had the first time, and there have been others when it's ended up looking like a crappy special effect (one time, it even looked very specifically like a Ray Harryhausen-style stop motion effect). But it never fails to appear when I need it, and I take that as a positive thing, that I'm at least able to hold on to a little bit of the imagination I had when I was a kid.

What I think this personal mental test is trying to tell me, after all this time, is that the ability to imagine is still there. Of course, it can't be as clear as it was when I was a teenager, and the combination of just figuring out how the world really is with my constant influx of fantastical thoughts and images created something so potent. But at least I've got the test of the gibbering demon to help me tap back into it.

The Theory of Conspiracies

Let me calibrate my BS level appropriately before I begin… I don't believe that aspartame causes multiple sclerosis, ADHD, and birth defects. I don't believe that fluoride is being used by the US government to keep us complacent and stupid, and calcifies our pineal glands. I don't believe that aliens are visiting us, routinely abducting and probing the general populus. I don't believe that 9/11 was an inside job. I don't believe that the US government already has a cure for cancer and won’t tell us about it. I don't believe that childhood immunizations cause autism. I *do* believe that most of the people who talk about how great and versatile a plant hemp is really just want to smoke it. I don't believe that the US government created the AIDS epidemic to destroy the African-American population. I don't believe that the best way the US government has found to poison its citizens is to put chromium and other toxins in airline jet engines and let it gently drift down on us from seven miles up.

Yes, the world has problems, but they're not part of an over-arching conspiracy. Know how I know? Because throughout history, one aspect of the human psyche has shone through time and time again, making it virtually impossible for conspiracies of any significant magnitude to survive. It boils down to one simple fact:

People can't keep their damn mouths shut.

Everyone loves to be the first to deliver important information to people who aren't in the know. It's what some people live for. It's the "gossip" gene that lives in all of our hearts. It's not an evil impulse... after all, where would we be as a global society if people didn't pass along important information, keeping their friends and loved ones abreast of all the things that they might not have time or connections to find out for themselves? I don't know how many times I've heard someone volunteer information that they had entirely no reason to, other than to say to me, in effect, "Here's something that I know that you don't". I’ve even done it myself from time to time.

With the amplifying effect of social media, this sort of thing can run rampant. Unfortunately, what seems to get passed around the most is stuff that sounds sensational but should probably be held up to more scrutiny or even a quick smell test (basically, the kind of stuff that I talked about in the first paragraph of this essay). Assume, for example, that 9/11 really was an inside job, and that the collapse of the World Trade Center towers was brought about by demolition charges discreetly being placed inside -- because, of course, it couldn't only be because their central supports had been degraded by jet fuel burning at a thousand or so degrees for an hour and a half, right? It would have taken a staff of hundreds to engineer such a feat of interior demolition, but no one has ever come forward to say anything of the sort, nor has any of the buildings’ survivors ever said, "You know, I did notice that there were a lot of extra people hanging around doing some wiring work a few weeks' before." I guarantee you, if someone had made the effort to perpetrate such a thing, literally thousands of people would have had to know about it, and at least one of them would have come forward to say so. But none have. Because the only way it’s easy to keep your damn mouth shut is when you don’t have anything to say.

I know, it's hard to tell reality from falsehood these days. For every wild claim made, there's some official-sounding organization saying that it's not true, then a retort saying that said organization is in the pockets of Big Business or Big Government, etc. But I have to defer to my main man Carl Sagan again, who said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Unfortunately, some think that "extraordinary evidence" comes in the form of a .jpg of black text on a white background with bad grammar and excessive caps and exclamation points, saying that the US government is lying about what happened at Roswell. Then people can pass it along with a click, just as easily as passing along a legitimate news article from a legitimate news source.

And, by the way, legitimate news sources are getting fewer and further between these days as well. But let’s just assume that if a website’s livelihood depends on that what they’re saying is actually true, then you might be reading someone who has a bit of bias. A cheap and easy cancer cure that “they” don’t want you to know about, outlined in an article from Bigpharmownsyoursoul.com, really should merit a second citation before you hit “share” and pass it to everyone you know.

I've just read Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, and it actually sort of ties into what I'm talking about here. Remember him? He's the guy who predicted with an astonishing amount of accuracy how individual states were going to go in the last presidential election. And here's the shocker... he did it by actually aggregating the results of polls! Asking people how they're going to vote is the best way to figure out how people are going to vote… who knew? But the point is that he didn't let his preconceived notions get in the way. Most people who are making predictions, he says, are always trying to find the secret, to boil the future down to one or two telltale signs, and there just aren't any. The only way to be totally objective is to expand your awareness into all the data being presented, instead of being beholden to one "story" that you want to be true and looking for the data that supports it.

Where this ties in to my rant about conspiracies is that it seems like this is what people are doing... looking for one thing that's causing the problems they face. And believe me, I get it. When people feel powerless, they look for a reason. As humans, that's just what we do. In fact, a psychological study recently showed that, when people feel like they don’t know what they’re doing, they’re more likely to “see” pictures in random static than folks who feel competent. If there's a problem, we try to identify the source of the problem so we can fix it. And if there's nothing clearly standing out as the main obstacle, we'll take something minor and turn it into the only thing that's keeping us down. Usually, that's the government, or big pharmaceutical companies, or the military/industrial complex, or something.

Do I believe that these institutions are flawless and blameless? Of course not. But following the principle of Occam's Razor, where the simplest answer is the most likely, I think the truth falls somewhere well in the middle. Now, a lot of people seem to think that the simplest answer to the problem means "The government's doing it to keep us in line!", but most big problems are complex, and instead of dealing with that we look for one simple answer, something we can comprehend and fixate on. This kind of thinking disregards the fact that the government is made up of people who get up and go to work every day just like we do. Even if the main policy makers were a close-knit cabal of evildoers sitting around wringing their hands and thinking up new ways to oppress people, the fact remains that they would have to enact these ideas through a huge network of tens of thousands of people. And, like I said, that many people are just not able to keep their damn collective mouths shut.

Going back to Nate Silver again, we live in an age where information is being generated and collected in terms of petabytes an hour. That's a lot of noise to sift through before you get to the signal. There are a lot of blind alleys and misleading data that might feel right, but just aren’t. There's a now-famous graph that shows how the rise in autism in children almost perfectly matches the rise in consumption of organic food in this country. So this fact has just as much merit as the idea that vaccines are causing it, but it never gained any traction. Why? Because it doesn't make psychological sense, and we don't want it to be true.

We live in a world where you get a lot of incendiary stuff thrown at you daily. I've sometimes thought about boycotting Facebook for a while, just so I can calm down from the outrage I feel about all the difficult issues it brings up incessantly. And then there are times when I find myself tipping the other way, getting cynical even about causes that I know are well-meaning and I should care about more. A sure-fire way to get me not to share something online is either tell me "Please share this" or "I bet people won't share this". And it's something I've just got to start working on, I know. I've got to be able to shrug off other people's wrongheaded beliefs and just focus on what I know to be right and true. But if that means that every now and then I've got to sit down and write 1500 words about how you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet, then maybe that's the price we'll just have to pay.

Danse Macabre: Summary and Revelation

Over the course of the summer and fall, I listened to Stephen King's Danse Macabre in audiobook form. It was one of the last takeaways I grabbed off the shelves at Borders before the Great Shutdown, so I had been saving it for a special occasion, and it seemed like my commute to a new job fit the bill nicely. Of course, I didn't know at the time that the job would last exactly 42 workdays, and it would take me a lot longer to finish the book than I had anticipated. But I did finally get through it, and I thought I would take a minute to discuss some of the things I learned about horror, and writing in general.

One has to bear in mind that King wrote DM in the early 80s, when he about five years of being a well-known author under his belt. But what impressed me about it this time around (I read it for the first time back in 2001) was how immersed and well-read he was in the history and mythology of horror. I suppose that shouldn't really come as a surprise -- it's not like he dropped in out of the sky and was suddenly brilliant at it. He's lived and breathed the stuff his whole life, as many of the childhood anecdotes in DM will attest to. Maybe it's that I *want* him to have been cut out of whole cloth… Anyway, Danse Macabre is a great dive into the history of the horror genre, and the psychological purpose it serves. So here are my thoughts on it, and I should point out that any great revelations or poignant connections contained herein are probably Steve-o's, and not mine.

The three pillars of horror, he attests, that all modern horror is built on, are novels: Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", Bram Stoker's "Dracula", and Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". All three are scary stories and make your blood run cold, of course, but the reason they are all so effective is that they all tap into some dark part of the human psyche and give it physical shape and form. After all, all good forms of literature are really about two things at the same time, aren't they?

Frankenstein is about the fear of death, and what lies beyond death. Every zombie film/novel/TV show descends directly from this. What does it mean to be dead (and, by extension, alive)? And we’ve all lost someone we love… what if the dead could be brought back?

Dracula is fear of the outsider, the thing that threatens our safe little societies. Back when Twilight was becoming big, I put forth the argument that the "vampires" in those books aren't really vampires, they're tragically romantic superheroes. Stoker's Dracula works so well because, as a character, the Count embodies the darkest parts of everything that Victorian society (the book's original audience) was afraid of: sex, disease, aristocracy, anti-Christianity. Sparkly vampires embody none of these things.

And then there's Edward Hyde... in the book, several people say that there's nothing outwardly wrong with him, nothing they can put their finger on, but there's clearly something malevolent that they can tell just by looking at him. He embodies the fear of the anger and primalness in ourselves, the inner ape, the part that wants to rebel against the very fabric of the society that keeps us safe.

Now that I think about it, I might have spoken too soon about how zombies are descended directly from Frankenstein. When I was following up with the summation of Dracula's effectiveness, I almost wrote "When someone figures out what our modern society is really afraid of, then they'll have found the next wave of horror." But then I realized, they already have! Because the modern incarnation of zombies, and how all zombie tales now are an "apocalypse", not just isolated cases of singular horror, really have figured out what we're afraid of in today's world: globalism, societal breakdown, unstoppable disease. And, much as Edward Hyde has always hidden inside Henry Jekyll, one of the worst things about zombies is not that they're some outside force imposing itself on the innocent. They really *are* us. In some cases, zombies even manage to carry some vestige of their humanity through into their afterlife (Romero's Dawn of the Dead being the granddaddy of this train of thought, where zombies are instinctively compelled to go to the mall in a grotesque parody of living).

So let me close with a restatement of what I was originally going to state much earlier in this essay, before the thesis revealed itself: When some new mainline into our human fears rises to take the zombie's place, I'll be really interested to see what form it takes.

Confessions of a Nailbiter

I've bitten my fingernails for as long as I can remember. I don’t know what it is about the process, but there’s something weirdly satisfying about it. But I’m finding, judging by how hard it is to start writing about it, that I don’t even properly know the words to describe what it’s like. More importantly, I wanted to write this entry to figure out exactly *why* I bite my nails. I mean, it's a pretty gross habit when I look at it objectively. Sticking your fingers in your mouth and ripping off your nails with your teeth? Ugh. But I do it quite often. So I want to see if I can dig into the reasons and find out why.

I’ve always suspected that I’ve had some sort of oral fixation from early childhood that I never got rid of. In fact, the look and feel of my last pacifier is one of the few memories I have from before the age of five. I’m also from the generation whose doctors were actively discouraging mothers from breastfeeding their children, so whether this is a predisposition or a replacement behavior is kind of up in the air.

Then again, I’m realizing that it goes beyond just fingernails. Looking back at my childhood, it seems like I would bite/chew on just about anything. My pencils (all wood back in those days, dagnabbit) were all ragged pieces of splintery wood before they were sharpened down even halfway, and I specifically remember a set of colored pens with concave rounded caps that I chewed on while I drew, so that by the time I was done with them they all looked like parasols. I even remember gnawing on the plastic earpieces of my glasses until they were jagged enough to scrape the skin behind my ears.

There was more discomfort to be had than that, as well. I bit my nails so much, and pushed the nail bed back so many times, that my fingers never actually bled. I was just left with a raw edge that, once it sits for a while, got really sore. I remember back in the worst times, when I hated having to put my hands in my pockets for any reason, because the tips of my fingers would hurt so badly. You would think that the pain of having my fingernails continuously bitten down to the quick and beyond would deter me, but it didn’t.

Part of the reason, I think, is that I was a nervous kid, which is something that I haven't fully admitted to myself yet. My penchant for daydreaming, along with the fact that my parents moved us to different schools every few years, made me always feel like the "new kid", and also instilled in me the sense that everyone knew what they were doing more than I did. I was also quiet and shy, more likely to sit and read by myself than interact with others. It wasn't that I didn't have friends, but I felt like I knew them less than the other kids knew each other. I felt like I was always playing catch-up, socially. And the fact that I was somewhat ahead in learning (I was one of only three kids who were reading the highest level classroom readers, and in second grade me and one other student studied math separately with the principal) just made me a little more awkward around the other kids.

My parents also had me see a psychologist because I had frequent "stress headaches", so that's another clue to my mindset. So as much as I don't want to pigeonhole myself Freudally, I must have been reverting to my oral fixation stage until it just became habitual. But that doesn't explain what I enjoy about it. There's just something unquantifiably satisfying about chewing something into shape, manipulating it. And I've never fully grown out of the habit of touching things to my lips. They're the most sensitive part of a person's body, so it makes sense to me that in order to fully get the sense of something, you need to press it to your lips. Babies do it constantly, and it seems like it’s carried over into my adult life.

My biting seems to come in phases. I'll bite them all off over the course of a few days, and then not feel the urge to bite them at all for a few weeks. Which is nice when they all grow out at the same rate... I'm usually running at an average of six or seven nails with whites on the tips at one time. But when they start getting a little long, I find myself starting to run them along the edges of my teeth, as if daring myself to bite them. And it doesn't take much... once I get a frayed edge along one of the nails, I find myself trying to trim it, to smooth off that rough edge by biting it. Of course, in the back of my mind I know that's never going to happen. I'm just going to end up with a shorter nail that's still ragged. And when I try to smooth the edges off, the nail's just going to get shorter and shorter until I'm back at the quick again.

It's not that I bite my nails when I'm nervous, though, although I do it more when I am. I also do it when I'm bored, or reading. I don't know why, but slowly nibbling away at my nails while I'm working my way through a book seems like a natural pairing. But as long as I've been doing it, I've also been trying to quit. I remember telling my third grade teacher to give me a heads-up when she noticed that I was doing it, but I wasn't expecting to see the normally-sweet woman glare at me and solemnly ask, "What am I seeing you do?" every time she would catch me. My parents tried to help too... One summer, they said that if I could finish the summer with fingernails they'd give me fifty dollars. That was an *immense* amount of money for me back then, and my brother and I literally spent days debating how we would spend it. I suppose all the intense speculation actually distracted me from biting, because I made it through to the goal date with fingers intact. My parents coughed up the money, I bought an Atari cartridge (as we had decided upon), and I went right back to biting my nails. Even scare tactics didn’t work; my fourth-grade teacher claimed that she knew a woman who had an appendectomy, and the doctors found that the removed gland was full of fingernails she had swallowed. Even back then, I thought this story had a whiff of bull to it, and I now I know that it was a blatant lie. It makes me wonder what else the average elementary teacher just pulls out of their ass.

Appendixes aside, I know there's a health issue here, because constantly putting your fingers in your mouth is a great way to expose yourself to all manner of germs. However, I have never really been a person who spends much of their time being sick. In fact, there have been times in my life when I've actually noticed how little time I've recently spent laid low by illnesses. In this modern world, where people say that the influx of children and adults with allergies is a by-product of our increasingly antibacterial world, I wonder if it’s possible that I've actually strengthened my immune system by exposing myself to so much disease. There's a study to be made there, measuring the relative strength of immune systems in thumb-suckers and nail-biters as compared to the general population.

Right now I'm in a latent phase, where my fingernails all have whites on them. And it's clearly not just because I'm in a low-stress period, either. It's all a matter of knowing my own psychology... I've taken to using an emery board to keep the edges smooth. I've found that when the edges are smooth, I'm much less likely to be tempted to bite them off. So I'm hoping that this time will stick. But I've thought this countless times before, only to find myself a few weeks later, fingertips aching and unable to pick up coins or open Ziploc bags. I suppose I'll be waging this war with myself for a long time to come, although I know how disgusting and unattractive a habit it is. Or maybe I've just got to put enough time between phases that I eventually forget why I do it in the first place.

Investigative Report #1: Lou Rawls

I'm one of those folks who is constantly checking snopes.com to see if the many random facts that are strewn about and shared on the Internets are true or not. And I’m always amazed at how in this age of information, we seem more inclined to spread disinformation than anything else. It kinds of ties into my recent blog post "Why We What We Believe", but I've got a short list of things that I recall or have heard about that I'm not able to find much internet information on. Most of them come from the great mystery zone that exists before 1995, which apparently is when people really started logging everything that happened online. But here's my first stab at doing some online sleuthing of my own...

The year was 1988. I was in my junior year of high school, and suddenly I started hearing the word "Lou" getting kicked around the school halls. It would always be couched in insulting phrases, mostly "Man, you got Lou!" Of course, it wasn't long until someone enlightened me with the origin of the phrase, and the story went like this: During the televised United Negro College Fund telethon that year, Lou Rawls came out to perform -- most likely his ubiquitous hit "You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine" -- and, during the performance, he passed gas loudly enough to be picked up by his handheld microphone.

Depending on which version of the story you heard, Lou was either visibly physically uncomfortable both before and after the incident, or he started laughing and could barely finish the song, well aware of what sound he had unintentionally added to his repertoire. Either way, the phrase "you got Lou" was almost immediately picked up by the youth of America to mean something akin to "you've just embarrassed yourself".

Years later, I thought it would be easy enough to look it up and see if this incident really happened. And to my surprise, there's no concrete evidence that it did. There's no YouTube video dubbed from an old VHS tape from back in the day of his performance, nor is there anything listed on various urban-myth sites debunking it. So I decided to dig a little deeper, and found that there are elements both supporting and refuting that Mr. Rawl's unfortunate digestive issues really ever got any airplay...

Supporting the allegation is the timing of the incident. That it sprung into existence so quickly and specifically certainly makes it sound plausible. Lou Rawls really was the host of the 1988 UNCF telethon, in fact it was officially called the "Lou Rawls Parade of Stars", and ended up raising over $9 million over the course of seven hours. It's quite reasonable that Mr. Rawls might have been near exhaustion or even physically ill from hosting such an event by the time it was over. If it really did happen, the students at my school started using the phrase immediately, lending it some legitimacy. And the fact that it seemed to originate with the black students at my school -- who, I assume, would be more likely to have watched the telecast -- makes it even more so.

Against it, though, is an incident that occurred at the 1976 Grammy awards, at which Lou also performed. No surprise there, since it was that year that "You Will Never Find..." actually hit the charts. However, in that performance, it's reported that Lou started coughing and could barely finish his performance, still coughing and laughing at the fact that he was coughing. Now, either both instances (the Grammys and the UNCF incident) both happened and got locked together, or people are getting the two confused.

Some people report seeing (and when they speak, they're talking about something they remember seeing at least 10 years previous, so you should take it with a grain of salt) Lou coming down some stairs at the 1988 telethon as he opened his song, then stopping singing and looking mortified. The band either stopped or continued to play. Lou either came back in to finish the song or didn't. The thing is, if you look you can find someone who remembers each possible scenario, so there's no definitive answer as far as I can tell.

Lou certainly didn't help his own case when, in the early 90s, he appeared on the sketch comedy show In Living Color, he came on to perform live soothing music for a man about to have a proctological exam. Since that time, some version of the phrase "having Lou" is listed in just about every online slang dictionary you can find.

To sum up, I'm still not sure whether the incident really happened or not. But I'll continue to check every now and then to see if someone has photographic evidence (with audio, of course). In a way, I kind of miss the days when you were unable to just look up things like this and find out immediately if there's any truth to them, and maybe that's why I've latched onto this urban fart myth so readily. True, I didn't find the information I was looking for, but it makes me think about how in the future, there will be no such mysteries as this.

What Does Enlightenment Get You?

Last summer, I had a job for two months that was in a small office building in an industrial park. I was a temp worker, and had a mandatory lunch hour to fill. I quickly got into the habit of eating for half an hour, then taking a half hour walk around the mile-long sidewalk loop that ringed the industrial park. It was summer, and it was often a hot but quick walk -- the park was young enough that there were no trees tall enough to offer any shade.

One of the places I would pass, aside from the offices of All Music Guide, my go-to website for music info, was Jewel Heart, a center for Tibetan Buddhism. Since I would often have at least fifteen minutes of walking left when I passed it, it almost always got me thinking about eastern meditation, and the quest for enlightenment. I know that Jewel Heart is not a Buddhist temple, and instead strives to find ways to incorporate the wisdom of Buddhism into everyday life, but my mind got churning anyway.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the nature of "enlightenment". I know that it's the goal of eastern philosophy, but what exactly does it mean? What would it feel like to be enlightened? In my mind, it must be the ability to see the world from a universal perspective, to completely understand that one person's life is both insignificant and profoundly connected to all other living things, and to live mindfully in that state at all times.

My second thought would be wondering who would want to live like this. I like to think of myself as having a somewhat global perspective on things... I'm always trying to think of things in the long-term. I'm not the sort of person who will get bent out of shape because things are taking longer than they should to come into effect. I believe (and explain it further in my post "How to Live Forever") that for the sake of sanity people should in general concentrate on the long term. It's the best way to keep from being stressed, and also to focus on staying "in the moment". However, when I think of the Buddhist monks who shut themselves away from the world in monasteries on the top of mountains, spending their lives contemplating their place in the universe and constantly meditating to try to comprehend it, I think they may be taking it too far.

Because shutting yourself off from the stresses and instability of life isn't the same as living. To dedicate oneself to being celibate, childless, and sheltered kind of exempts you from actually having experienced life, doesn't it? What's left when all the things that really define participation in the human race are consciously taken out of the equation? If "peace" is all you're looking for, sure, you're probably going to find it, but death is an even easier way to achieve the same end. I don't mean to sound harsh, and I know that there is value in regular meditation, fasts, retreats, etc. But if these periods of introspection don't take place in the context of the usual stresses and trials of life, then don't they become meaningless?

As I understand it, one of the goals of Buddhism is to remove desire from one's life. Desire, it teaches, is the basis of all evil and unhappiness. If you want something, anything at all, then any choices you make from that point are in the interest of you getting that thing, not in the interest of living in a way that benefits all. But isn't desire the thing that defines us as human beings? We're the only living things on the planet that aren't at the whim of our desire for things 24/7. The entire animal kingdom has been fueled for billions of years solely by the drive to obtain food and sex. So why are we, the only beings on the planet who are able to realize this fact, trying to pry ourselves away from it? If our goal is to establish and be mindful of our connectedness with all things, I don't see how striving to make ourselves separate from the rest of it is a reasonable goal.

I could have it all wrong. I might be totally misreading the intentions of Buddhist enlightenment. And I'm usually of the mind that if a belief system makes you happy and doesn't infringe on any else's beliefs or rights, then good luck and more power to you, because you’re already ahead of a lot of people. In that, Buddhist monastic life is the perfect lifestyle. But in the end, I don't really know what enlightenment will get you if you don't also live life as the rest of us do.